The material world of pop life
The opening of “Pop Life” at the Tate Modern was greeted, appropriately enough, with hype and controversy. And what could be more sensational than Scotland Yard appearing at the doorstep of London’s cathedral of modern art, threatening to suspend the champagne popping unless “Spiritual America,” a work by American painter and photographer Richard Prince, was withdrawn from the exhibition.
The bone of contention was that the piece, framed in faux-gilt frame, featured a naked, 10-year-old Brooke Shields. Rising from a bathtub, her body was pre-pubescent but her face was heavily made up to look like a grown woman, complete with garish lipstick and eye shadow. For the 1983 work, Prince re-photographed the starlet’s 1973 image taken by Garry Gross and borrowed the title from Alfred Stieglitz’s 1923 photograph depicting the haunches of a gelded workhorse.
The original photograph was actually authorized by the mother of Brooke Shields for $450 and came out in a Playboy publication called Sugar ‘n’ Spice. The grownup Shields later tried, but was unsuccessful, in suppressing the photo’s release. Prince appropriated the Gross photo for “Spiritual America,” which was displayed without label or explanation in a storefront in a rundown street in Lower East Side, New York.
He described the image as “a body with two different sexes, maybe more, and a head that looks like it’s got a different birthday.”
Observers interpreted it as a comment on the shift in America’s preoccupations from “labor” to “look” and an indictment of the exploitation of children as the late 20th century’s beasts of burden.
For the British police, it simply broke obscenity laws as well as the Child Protection Act. For the Tate, the show just had to go on and so it promptly replaced the piece with “Spiritual America IV,” also by Prince and with Shields as the subject as well, but this time as an adult clad in a bikini.
If nudity was the only issue, there were many more risqué images on exhibit, such as the works of Jeff Koons’ “Made In Heaven” series, all sequestered in a heavily guarded room with no access to minors. The collection of paintings and sculptures flagrantly celebrate, as well as illustrate, the artist’s nuptials with the Hungarian-born porn star and politician Ilona Staller, aka La Cicciolina. Criticized as porn under the guise of art, this series swept Koons into tabloid fame and secured his leading role in the international art stage. After seeing her in porn magazines, the artist contacted Staller and produced a series of photographs that enacted his sexual fantasies, later on turning into reality as they developed a relationship and eventually got married.
Koons imagined that they were like a latter-day Adam and Eve, “situated after the fall, but without the guilt and shame.” Nothing was spared, with speculations that even doubles were used, to ensure that everything was porn-perfect. The first of the series, resembling a poster for an imaginary film, was used as an outdoor billboard for a group exhibition at New York’s Whitney Museum of Art in 1989. Another set of photographs was shown at the Venice Biennale in 1990, with work being completed after their marriage in 1991. The final versions were, of course, the most explicit, with the artist’s body becoming more muscular “so as to become a vehicle for greater communication,” as justified by Koons.
“Dirty — Jeff on Top,” a massive sculpture of the couple consummating their marital union on a rock plinth, dominates the center of the room like a monument to their short-lived marriage. There’s also one in glass called “Couch (Kama Sutra),” and a classical bust in white marble, “Bourgeois Bust — Jeff and Ilona.” The “Made In Heaven” works — particularly the large-scale photos featuring fellatio, cunnilingus, penetration, you name it — no doubt elicited strong reactions but many just suspended judgment or comment since they were too embarrassed to contemplate the works long enough in order to give any judicious appraisal.
There was one observer, however, who felt it went too far and that, referring to the 1991 silk-screened oil on canvas “Ilona’s Asshole,” he could have just been spared such tasteless exhibitionism. Perhaps a more aesthetically pleasing sight, though admittedly not as graphic, was “Wall Relief with Bird,” a polychromed sculpture of a long-beaked humming bird pollinating a cluster of flowers. But then, this is “Pop Life” — works of this sort do not really cut it and Jeff Koons would not be the Jeff Koons we know today if he didn’t produce tabloid-worthy material featuring none other than himself, of course.
This brings to light the whole premise of the show (Subtitled “Art in A Material World”), which illustrates how these pop artists have embraced both commerce and celebrity as the foundations of their work. They have found that marketing and publicity are means of engaging modern life beyond the confines of the studio, the gallery and the museum.
The godfather of this current crop of artists seems to be Andy Warhol, judging by the number of rooms dedicated to his oeuvre.
It was Warhol, after all, who said that “Making money is art, and working is art, and good business is the best art.” Although he was derided by many in the art world for his shameless devotion to the marketplace, many artists have followed his lead since his death in 1987. Producing many self-portraits throughout his career, he was also a regular feature in gossip columns and chat shows, making his visage as instantly recognizable as any brand-named product in the market. His face, in fact, became a commodity that he hired out to advertisers. A video in the exhibit plays a loop of the familiar platinum-bewigged artist hawking TDK videocassettes on Japanese television. Another one shows him as a guest on the cheesy TV series The Love Boat.
With unabashed self-promotion and social climbing, he established Interview magazine to get into the most important parties and meet the top celebrities whose famous serigraph portraits he churned out from sweatshops in New York. These became so commercial that offers were made for second portraits at discounted prices. It was American consumer culture at its unrepentant worst, causing dismay in the art world where critics also pointed out Warhol’s artistic bankruptcy through the recycling of his signature motifs that made him famous in the ‘60s, like the Campbell’s soup can, the face of Marilyn Monroe, and his earlier self-portraits which he started recycling in new incarnations and in serial repetition.
But Warhol had his shining moments like his “Gems” series, a spoof on his own awestruck fascination with the trappings of wealth. A collector of diamonds and jewelry, the artist celebrated the objects of his desire with paintings of gemstones in different cuts, full-frame fetishes rendered in phosphorescent paint that glow in a room with ultraviolet light. Diamond powder was added to the canvas as well, as a final touch to these very personal pieces.
Warhol’s legacy to succeeding artists was the establishment of a presence beyond the narrow boundaries of fine art. The best example of this was Keith Haring who became famous in the early ‘80s when he started his chalk illustrations over unsold advertising marquees in New York’s subway stops. These cartoon-like line drawings, which included his signature radiant child that became his logo, was a way of bringing art into the daily lives of the city’s commuters. It made Haring a major figure in the downtown art scene and even paved the way for collaborations with Warhol who became a close friend. At the height of his popularity in 1986, the artist opened Pop Shop in New York, selling merchandise with his signature visual style. The exhibit recreates this shop in a room with the walls, floors and ceiling covered in Haring’s black and white graffiti, and with a rap soundtrack playing as the cash register goes ka-ching. Just like his subway drawings, the Pop Shop accesses the public directly and makes art affordable for the average consumer.
“I knew I would be attacked,” said Haring after critics complained about the crass commercialism, but he was steadfast in his thanks to the support of Warhol whom he idolized and thought was “the only figure that represented any real forerunner of the attitude about making art in a more public way and dealing with art as part of the real world.”
Whereas Warhol’s “good business” was the marketing of “a product that’s not you,” on the other end is the danger of prostitution, a merging of self and product. Accusations of metaphorical prostitution are standard, of course, but in the case of Cosey Fanni Tutti and Andrea Fraser, the accusations were literal. Cosey Fanni Tutti appeared as a model in more than 40 pornographic “magazine actions” within titles like Playbirds, Exposure and Sex Fantasy, and later exhibited the magazine layouts as art works in the 1976 London exhibition, “Prostitution.”
In her own words: “My express intention with the project was both to infiltrate the sex market to create (and purchase) my own image…and to gain firsthand experience of being a genuine participant in the genre. To achieve my aim, I couldn’t adopt the approach of a voyeuristic or analytic artist viewing from the outside because that wouldn’t provide me with a true experience. What was required of me was to become ‘one of the girls.’”
Instead of criticizing ideals of sexuality peddled by the porn industry, Fanni Tutti set out to inhabit them with various fantasy personas, from a faux-naïve “Tessa from Sunderland” to a lesbian love “painting and decorating” scene in Knave magazine.
Three decades later, New-York based performance artist Andrea Fraser raised the concept of “prostitution” once again with her work, Untitled (2003), an hour-long video that records the pre-arranged sexual encounter of the artist and an unknown private collector recruited by the gallery. The videotape was produced in an edition of five, with the first one going to the participating collector for $20,000. The money, Fraser insists, was “not for sex, but to make an artwork. All of my work is about what we want from art, what collectors want, what artists want from collectors, what museum audiences want... not only economically, but in more personal, psychological and affective terms.”
With this act, Fraser seems to push the viewer’s desire for intimacy with the artist to their logical extreme. Contrary to prostitution, which is evoked as a metaphor for the reduction of all human relationships to economic exchange, Fraser feels that her videotape piece works in the opposite direction: “Buying and selling of art is, in fact, an economic exchange. Untitled turns it into a very human relationship. The collector had to ‘pay’ much more than money; he paid with his body and his image in the video and with his presence.”
In consonance with Warhol’s motto, British art superstar Damien Hirst brazenly bypassed the established method of selling through galleries and sold directly from his studio instead. Perhaps emboldened by the landmark 50-million-pound sale of his diamond-encrusted platinum skull titled “For the Love of God,” he staged an unprecedented auction through Sotheby’s in September 2008. The much-hyped event had the added drama of coinciding with the collapse of Lehman Brothers, a flashpoint in the global economic downturn. Despite the timing, there were two days of feverish buying, with 223 lots sold for record-breaking sales of 111.4 million pounds.
Entitled “Beautiful Inside My Head Forever,” the auction included glitzy new variations on his familiar themes like formaldehyde sculptures, butterflies, spot and spin paintings, and medicine cabinets. This time, the animals had gold hooves, the butterflies were studded with jewels and diamonds lined the medicine cabinets. Titles of the works like “Golden Calf” gave a nod to cautionary tales of wealth and idolatry, blithely mocking the censure of critics. But the art works seemed secondary to the auction itself, a performance which was Hirst’s supreme artistic statement, something he turned into total theater, infiltrating the art market in the process and dazzling his audience as always.
If there is anyone who knows how to sell himself and his art today, it must be Takashi Murakami, the Japanese artist whose works keep the tills ringing in venues from tony Louis Vuitton boutiques to quotidian 7-Eleven convenience stores. He even set up KaiKai Kiki Co. Ltd., his version of Warhol’s Factory, to churn out endless incarnations of Japanese cuteness inspired by his country’s popular anime style of animation, manga comic books and other themes from mass media to pop culture. Blurring the lines between high and low art, he does everything from 30-foot sculptures and paintings to mass-produced shokugan snack-toy figurines and phone caddies.
He pioneered the Superflat art movement, referring to flattened forms in Japanese graphic art, animation and fine arts as well as what art and design writer Hunter Drohojowska-Philp refers to as “the shallow emptiness of Japanese consumer culture.” For “Pop Life,” there’s a fiberglass anime sculpture of “Hiropon” with oversized balloon breasts spurting milk that turns into a skipping rope ring around her. This same figure comes in the tiny shokugan version given free when you buy two packages of gum. Another sculpture is the Kanye Bear with the requisite bling necklace worn by the rapper Kanye West, another celebrity collaborator like Marc Jacobs who is seen with Murakami regularly in paparazzi photos reminiscent of Warhol.
The final room features Akihabara Majokko Princess, a short film made exclusively for the exhibition by Murakami in collaboration with big names from Hollywood like actress Kirsten Dunst and high-profile commercial director McG. Set in Akihabara, a crowded electronics shopping district and epicenter of anime culture in Tokyo, the film features Dunst in a blue wig and bright pink skirt as the archetype magical princess of anime dancing to the song Turning Japanese by the Vapors.
Plush toys of Murakami, of course, subliminally appear in the background together with extras in anime character costumes and a cameo by Murakami as the flowerball, which is the signature souvenir for sale at the Tate Museum Shop. It was loud, kinetic, self-promotional and reeking of big Hollywood bucks. So fitting a closing statement of what pop art has come to be.
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“Pop Life” has closed at the Tate Modern in London but can now be viewed at Hamburger Kunsthalle in Hamburg, Germany, till May 9. Log on to www.hamburger-kunsthalle.de
